The relatives of the dead crewmen of the Kursk yesterday forced President Vladimir Putin to abandon what was to have been the centrepiece of the bereavement rites as Russia marked a day of official mourning for the 118 lost submariners.

While flags were flown at half-mast on all government buildings, special services of commemoration held in churches throughout the country, and light entertainment cancelled, Mr Putin returned to Moscow from the Arctic circle abruptly early yesterday, calling off plans to go out to the site of the disaster in the Barents Sea to cast funeral wreaths on to the water.

The sudden cancellation of the ceremony followed several hours of tense, deeply emotional, and at times hostile discussions between the president and the grieving families at the Kursk's base of Vidyayevo outside Murmansk.

The abandoning of the Barents Sea ritual was unique for Russia. It marked the first time that analysts could recall a Kremlin chief cancelling an official ceremony under public pressure, highlighting the scale of the popular outrage gripping Russia at the loss of the seamen and also the increasing role public opinion is playing in Russian politics.

Hundreds of relatives crowded into the Vidyayevo naval officers' hall for Mr Putin's belated first appearance in the far north 10 days after the submarine sank in still unexplained circumstances.

He listened intently to the bitter complaints of the navy widows. For the first time in a crisis that has dealt a severe blow to his authority the president emerged with his reputation relatively intact, according to some of those present.

But despite the widespread public disgust with the navy commanders, a senior admiral yesterday sounded unrepentant at the conduct of his peers throughout the Kursk tragedy.

Admiral Vladimir Yegorov, the chief of Russia's Baltic fleet, insisted there had been no failure to supply information, that the navy was in sound financial shape, and that its rescue personnel and equipment were second to none.

By contrast, the defence minister, Igor Sergeyev, the navy chief, Vladimir Kuroyedov, and the commander of the Northern Fleet, Vyacheslav Popov, have all offered to resign, but Mr Putin refused to accept their resignations.

Mr Putin was supposed to lead the national mourning yesterday by going out to sea with the relatives to cast flowers at the scene of the tragedy, but many of the wives refuse to accept that their husbands are dead and feared that such a ceremony at sea would absolve the government of responsibility to bring out the corpses.

"The grief is immeasurable, there are not enough words of comfort. My heart hurts, but yours hurt even more," Mr Putin told the families. They were promised compensation payments amounting to 10 years' salary.

On one of the rare occasions when the authorities have been frank and direct with the families, Mr Putin told them it would take months to raise the stricken submarine and bring out the bodies, even if it was possible.

In a letter leaked to the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda and which they gave the president's entourage, more than 20 widows and mothers called for the defence minister and the three top navy officers to be put on trial.

In a further sign of their mistrust of officialdom the widows demanded that the search for the bodies in the sunken vessel be carried out in the presence of independent witnesses.

Mr Putin's trip to Vidyayevo marked his first serious attempt to claw back some moral high ground after his catastrophic decision to stay on holiday at the other end of Russia for the first week of the drama.

The scale of his miscalculation emerged clearly from a poll published yesterday in the largest circulation paper, Trud. It found that 28% of those surveyed thought worse of him now than before the tragedy. Based on a sample of 500 Muscovites, it also found that 22.5% blamed him for the sailors' deaths.

Another 35% put the blame on the naval high command.

The All-Russian Public Opinion Centre, which polled 1,574 people across Russia in its regular monthly survey, announced yesterday that confidence in the president had fallen by 8%.

Emerging from a special memorial mass in Moscow's cathedral of Christ the Saviour, Yevgeni Levlampiyev, a 20-year-old history student, said he had not voted for Mr Putin because he had no confidence in the president's commitment to free speech and democracy.

"But he got to power by exploiting the very strong nostalgia people have for the past, their national sense of humiliation, and the Chechen issue. I never thought he would betray the armed forces."

"His mistake will cost him dearly," said Natasha Lemyagova, his 16-year-old companion. "He should have gone to Murmansk on the first day."